"So would you," Betty informed him, "if you were starving after a morning's work and your lunch was stolen."
"Gee, that is tough!" exclaimed Bob sympathetically. "Who stole it?"
"We don't know," volunteered Bobby. "But all those boxes couldn't take wings and fly away."
"You go back and get the fellows," Bob commanded Tommy Tucker. "We were having a potato roast down by the lake, and while the potatoes were baking some of us came up for more wood," he explained to the girls. "We thought we heard voices, and so I whistled."
Tommy Tucker was flying down to the lake before half of this explanation was given.
"Have you a holiday, too?" Betty asked. "We're out to get decorations for the play."
"It's the colonel's birthday," explained Bob, "and the old boy gave us the day off. Here come the fellows."
Half a dozen more cadets joined them, all boys the girls had met at the games. They were loud in their expressions of sympathy for the disappointed picnickers and promptly offered their potatoes as refreshments when they should be done.
"Oh, we're going to get that lunch back," announced Bob Henderson confidently. "Look here!"
He pointed to some footprints in a bit of muddy ground.